


It Came As No Surprise

by OpalBee



Series: His Brother's Keeper [2]
Category: Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Helgen, Reminiscing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-19
Updated: 2017-11-19
Packaged: 2019-02-04 12:11:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12770802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OpalBee/pseuds/OpalBee
Summary: Hadvar reflects back on his prior acquaintance with the Dragonborn.





	It Came As No Surprise

**Author's Note:**

  * For [emperorforshort (fus_ro_david)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fus_ro_david/gifts).



> emperorforshort (fus_ro_david) mentioned wanting a chapter from Edric's POV, and while this isn't it, it gives a bit more insight into his character, and a peek at the end towards a future chapter. I hope you enjoy it!

Hadvar remembered him. Oh, did he remember him.

They had been recruits together, in Solitude, both of them 16, or at least that was what the other boy had said. He hadn’t looked a day over twelve, a skinny runt of a lad, obviously malnourished, but he swore his birth papers weren’t forged and that he was actually a few months older than Hadvar.  _Edric Dainasson_. The Legion wanted surnames to keep track of their people, and like many Nords neither of them had one, so Edric had taken his mother’s name, and Hadvar his father’s. Hadvar had thought nothing of it. Such things didn’t matter as much in Skyrim as they did other places. He wasn’t one to judge people on the circumstances of their birth.

But what he had no trouble at all judging was the other boy’s attitude. There was too much of it, and all the wrong kind. Hadvar had joined the Legion to carry on a family tradition. His father and his father’s father, back at least four generations, had been Legionnaires. Edric had joined simply because he didn’t know what else to do with himself and wanted to see Tamriel, or so he’d said, with a sort of bored arrogance that grated on Hadvar’s nerves.

Hadvar hadn’t bought it for a second. He knew the signs of poverty, the sort of bone-deep poverty that was all too common in Skyrim, and he had seen it in the boy’s mother, much too young to have a teenage son but beautiful, by the Nine (Eight?) she was beautiful, even wearing little better than rags, half-starved herself and flighty, wringing her hands and fussing and weeping over Edric, while the lad reassured her and cooed over her in return. It had been...bizarre, and more than a little unsettling to watch. It was clear that the child had too often had to play the parent, and that something was not quite right with Daina. 

Still, the love between the two was obvious, and Hadvar couldn’t help but pity the two of them, that they’d only had each other, though he’d had to glean that via inference, not directly from anything Edric said. The lad was tightfisted with personal information, seeming to get a kick out of being mysterious, when it was much more likely that he was embarrassed by his roots, or the lack thereof.

Hadvar couldn’t fault his determination though, or his courage. The scrap of a kid didn’t hesitate to take on others twice his size, and he trained twice as hard as anyone else, once he was eating properly. Had a talent for magic as much as the sword, and while the other Nord recruits had turned up their noses at that, the officers in charge of their training had been delighted, as much as any Legion officer could be delighted by anything. 

They didn’t find the lad’s attitude delightful, or his penchant for questioning everything, a habit which had gotten Edric extra chores and drills more times than Hadvar could count, but Edric always took his lumps with an obnoxious cheerfulness, acting as if he had not only expected but hoped for the punishment. It hadn’t earned him any friends among the other recruits, but the lad could be charming when he wanted to be, and fun to have around when he was inclined, quick to sing with a pretty voice, good for a game or a drink or a tumble, though few took Edric up on it, as young as he looked.

Still, it was hard to hold things against him, suspecting why he acted as he did, and Hadvar wasn’t mean, and when Edric asked him about where he had grown up, and what it had been like, he had answered honestly, without any hard feelings. Edric was never mean to anyone either, had a bit of an edge at times or something a little off in his eyes, sometimes a bit impatient with the slower recruits, but never cruel, and so Hadvar didn’t mind talking to him. Edric seemed to seek out Hadvar more than the others, though he didn’t fool himself that there was any real desire for friendship on the scrawny lad’s part. If he sometimes saw Edric watching the others who were making friends with poorly-hidden envy or loneliness, well, he had done it to himself, and Hadvar wasn’t about to go the extra mile to make up for the other boy’s social deficits.

When it came time for them to go to their separate units though, Hadvar wasn’t sorry to see him go, and if the other boy ever crossed his mind in the ten years after that it was briefly, with Hadvar wondering how long Edric Dainasson had lasted before being discharged for insubordination.

It was early 201 when Hadvar saw him again, in Helgen, Edric part of the unit stationed there, responsible for guarding the Pale Pass. Hadvar was attached to General Tullius’ personal unit, a high honor, and had come into Helgen to prepare for a special mission in the Rift that was being kept hush-hush. 

At first Hadvar couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw the other man coming towards him, wearing the armor of a praefect just as Hadvar was, his blond hair a bit darker now and touched with white, of all things, and by the gods he was as arrogant as ever, no, worse, a touch of swagger in his walk, a certain awareness about him that he knew he was being watched, knew how handsome he was. Where Edric’s arrogance before had been the defensiveness of an insecure boy, now it was the full-blown conceit of someone who truly believed they were better than everyone else.

Edric seemed genuinely happy to see Hadvar, even flirted a bit as he hadn’t bothered doing when they were young, though Hadvar wasn’t interested, and wouldn’t have been even if he leaned that way. The last thing he wanted was to be another notch on that belt, and it didn’t take long to hear just how notched that belt was. And why wouldn’t it be, when a man looked like that? It wasn’t as if Hadvar couldn’t recognize another man’s beauty. And of course Edric was more aware of that beauty than anyone else. The vanity the man oozed was utterly repellent.

It also didn’t take long to hear that Edric’s confidence wasn’t entirely undeserved. He was ridiculously skilled, no one denied that, an expert spellsword, quick on his feet, hard-hitting with both weapon and magic, with a talent for healing. He was exactly the kind of soldier that any unit would be blessed to have...if he weren’t Edric. Hadvar could tell the man’s fellows liked him well enough, that was true, but it was clear that his superior officer despised him, though Captain Caelia was also rumored to be one of those Colovians who despised Nords in general.

When a month later Hadvar was standing in the courtyard watching said captain put her boot in Edric’s back and shove him to his knees before the block, Hadvar couldn’t say he was surprised. He supposed it was sort of inevitable, really. Sooner or later Edric would have pushed his insubordination too far, and firing up that spell to take out the captain, in front of General Tullius no less, was outright mutiny.

He couldn’t say he was surprised either when he saw that Edric had lived through the dragon’s assault, or that Edric was following Ralof. Traitors both of them. Two of a kind.

And when not six months later he heard that the Dragonborn had come again, and three months after that Whiterun had fallen to the Stormcloaks, and that the Dragonborn was a former Legionnaire who had lived through Helgen...well, it would only figure if it was Edric, wouldn’t it? Because of course it was. It had to be, and yet what proof did he have other than that sick knot of suspicion in his gut? 

When he heard two years later, while trying to recover from Solitude, trying to figure out what to do with his life, trying to figure out a way to live with his anger, that the Dragonborn had said in a rage that he was married to Ralof, that had only clinched it, and when the full reveal had come a year later it had been rather anticlimactic.

And when a few weeks later he decided to go home to Riverwood, to find some way to move on and pick up the pieces of a life he hadn’t planned for, who should come striding into the Sleeping Giant Inn but the arrogant bastard himself? Because of course Hadvar couldn’t be allowed any peace, not in the same country that contained Edric Dainasson, who of course also had kin here in town, if only by marriage, and would only keep coming back here time and again. The only comfort Hadvar had was that the swagger was gone from Edric’s step, replaced with darker, uglier things, his beauty marred by Alduin. It was impossible not to look at that face and have that reminder staring at you and not think about it.

Well then. Two could play at the Dragonborn’s game. If Hadvar was going to have to put up with having Edric around, it would be on his own terms. When the flyer went up in Riverwood calling for people to try out for the Companions, Hadvar had to laugh.


End file.
